by Jo Nesbo
She lay on the bed in a black corset and nylons. Also bought by him. At the bed head there was a champagne cooler containing an open bottle, which she was obviously well into. He absorbed the sight of her. She was the most beautiful, most gorgeous woman he had ever been with. Every single time he saw her he was struck by her beauty, as though it were the first time. And he could feel every caress they had exchanged, every wild ride they’d had. And now he was renouncing this. Now and for ever.
‘Caithness,’ Duff said, feeling his throat thicken. ‘My dear, dear, beautiful Caithness.’
‘Come here.’
‘I can’t . . .’
‘Of course you can. You’ve been able to for so long, so many times, this is just the last. You owe me that.’
‘You won’t enjoy it. Neither of us will.’
‘I don’t want to enjoy it, Duff. I want closure. I want you to crawl, for once. I want you to swallow your virtue and do as I want. And now this is what I want. Just this. And afterwards you can go to hell and home to the meal with the wife you no longer love. Come on now. I can see from here you’re ready for—’
‘No, Caithness. I can’t. You said you’d be satisfied with what you could have of my heart. But I can’t just give you a bit of that, Caithness. Then I would be cheating twice, both you and the mother of my children. And what you said about me not loving her any more isn’t true.’ He inhaled. ‘Because I’d forgotten. But then I remembered. That I love her and I always have. And I’ve been unfaithful to you with my own wife.’
He saw the words hit home. Saw the thin, false veneer of seduction melt into deep shock. Then tears sprang from her eyes, and she curled up, pulled up the sheet and covered herself.
‘Goodbye, Caithness. Hate me as I should be hated. I’m leaving now.’
At the front door Duff took the clothes and toiletries under his arm. The racket could stay. You don’t play tennis on a smallholding. He stood looking at the earrings and necklace. Heard Caithness’s pained sobs from the bedroom. It was expensive jewellery – it had cost him more than strictly speaking he could afford – but now, in his hand, it had no value. There was no one he could give it to anyway, except a pawnbroker. But could he bear the thought of this jewellery being worn by a stranger?
He hesitated. Looked at his watch. Then he put down the other things, took the jewellery and went back to the bedroom.
She stopped crying when she saw him. Her face was wet with tears, black with make-up. Her body shook with a last sob. One stocking had slipped down, also a shoulder strap.
‘Duff . . .’ she whispered.
‘Caithness,’ he said with a gulp. Sugar in his stomach, blood rushing in his head. The jewellery fell on the floor.
The sergeant grabbed the rifle from behind the bar and ran to the window; the rest of the club members were already on their way to the arms cupboard. Outside there was a lorry standing side on to the club house. The engine was running and the club gate was still hanging off its front bumper. As was Chang. The sergeant put the rifle to his shoulder as the tarpaulin over the back of the lorry dropped. And there were SWAT in their ugly black uniforms, their guns raised. But there was something even uglier on board, something which made the blood in the sergeant’s veins turn to ice. Three monsters. Two of them made of steel and on stands, with ammunition feeds, rotating barrels and cooling chambers. The third stood between them, a bald, lean, sinewy man the sergeant had never seen before but knew he had always known, had always been close to. And now this man raised his hand and shouted, ‘Loyalty, fraternity!’
The others responded: ‘Baptised in fire, united in blood!’
Then a single command: ‘Fire.’ Of course. Fire.
The sergeant got him in his sights and pulled the trigger. One shot. The last.
The raindrop fell from the sky, through the mist, towards the filthy port below. Heading for an attic window beneath which a couple were making love. The man was silent as his hips went up and down, slowly but with force. The woman beneath him clawed the sheet as, sobbing and impatient, she received him. The gramophone record had stopped playing its sweet melody some time ago, and the stylus kept bumping monotonously, like the man, against the record label with the command Love Me Tender. But the lovers didn’t appear to notice, didn’t appear to notice anything apart from the repetitive motion they were caught up in, didn’t even notice each other as they banged away, banging out demons, banging out reality, the world around them, this town, this day, for these few minutes, this brief hour. But the raindrop never reached the window pane above them. A cold gust from the north-west drew the drop east of the river that split the town lengthways and south of the disused railway line dividing the town diagonally. It fell on the factory district, past Estex’s extinguished chimneys and further east towards the fenced-in low timber building between the closed factories. There the drop ended its passage through the air and hit the shiny skull of a lean man, ran down his forehead, stopped for an instant in his short eyelashes, then fell like a tear down one cheek that had never known real tears.
Seyton didn’t notice he had been hit. Not by a random raindrop, nor by the sergeant’s bullet. He stood there, legs planted wide, his hand raised, feeling only the vibrations through the lorry as the Gatling guns opened up, feeling them spread from the soles of his shoes up to his hips, feeling the sound pound evenly on his eardrums, a sound that rose from a chattering mumble to a roar and then to a concerted howl as the barrels spat out bullets faster and faster. And as time passed, as the club house in front of them was shot to pieces, he felt the heat from the two machines. Two machines from hell with one function, to swallow the metal they were fed and spit it out again like bulimic robots, but faster than anything else in the world. So far the machine-gunners hadn’t seen much damage, but gradually it became apparent as windows and doors fell off and parts of the walls simply dissolved. A woman appeared on the floor inside the door. Sections of her head were missing, while her body was shaking as if from electric shocks. Seyton sensed he had an erection. Must be the vibrations of the lorry.
One machine gun stopped firing.
Seyton turned to the gunner.
‘Anything wrong, Angus?’
‘The job’s done now,’ Angus shouted back, pulling his blond fringe to the side.
‘No one stops until I say so.’
‘But—’
‘Is that understood?’ Seyton yelled.
Angus swallowed. ‘For Banquo?’
‘That’s what I said! For Banquo! Now!’
Angus’s machine gun opened up again. But Seyton could see that Angus was right. The job was done. There wasn’t a square decimetre in front of them that wasn’t perforated. There was nothing that wasn’t destroyed. Nothing that wasn’t dead.
He still waited. Closed his eyes and just listened. But it was time to let the girls have a rest.
‘Stop!’ he shouted.
The machine guns fell silent.
A cloud of dust rose from the obliterated club house. Seyton closed his eyes again and breathed in the air. A cloud of souls.
‘What’s up?’ lisped Olafson from the end of the lorry.
‘We’re saving ammo,’ Seyton said. ‘We’ve got a job this afternoon.’
‘You’re bleeding, sir! Your arm.’
Seyton looked down at his jacket, which was stuck to his elbow where blood was pouring from a hole. He placed a hand on the wound. ‘It’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘Handguns at the ready, everyone. We’ll go in and do a body count. If you find Sweno, tell me.’
‘And if we find any survivors?’ Angus asked.
Someone laughed.
Seyton wiped a raindrop from his cheek. ‘I repeat. Macbeth’s order was that none of Banquo’s murderers should survive. Is that a good enough answer for you, Angus?’
21
MEREDITH WAS HANGING SHEETS ON the line ove
r the veranda by the front door. She loved this house, the rural, unpretentious, traditional, sober but practical essence of it. When people heard that she and Duff lived on a farm in Fife they automatically assumed it was a luxurious estate and probably thought she was being coy when she described how simply they lived. What would a woman with her surname be doing on a disused smallholding, they must have thought.
She had washed all the bedlinen in the house so that Duff wouldn’t think she had only done the sheets of the marital bed. Where they would sleep tonight. Forget the bad stuff, repress what had been. Reawaken what they’d had. It had been dormant, that was all. She felt her stomach grow warm at the thought. The intimacy they had shared on the rock this morning had been so wonderful. As wonderful as in the first years. No, more wonderful. She hummed a tune she had heard on the radio – she didn’t know what it was – hung up the last sheet and ran her hand over the wet cotton, inhaled the fragrant perfume. The wind blew the sheet high in the air, and the sunshine swept over her face and dress. Warm, pleasant, bright. This is how life should be. Making love, working, living. This was what she had been brought up to do, this was still her credo.
She heard a seagull scream and shaded her eyes. What was it doing here, so far from the sea?
‘Mum!’
She had hung the washing over several lines, so she had to move between them, skip her way to the front door.
‘Yes, Ewan?’
Her son was sitting on a bench, his chin propped on one hand, looking into the distance. Squinting into the low afternoon sun. ‘Won’t Dad be here soon?’
‘Yes, he will. How’s the soup doing, Emily?’
‘It was ready aeons ago,’ the daughter said, dutifully stirring the big pot.
Broth. Simple, nutritious peasant food.
Ewan stuck out his lower lip. ‘He said he’d be here before the meal.’
‘You hang him up by his toes for breaking his promise,’ Meredith said, stroking his fringe.
‘Should people be hung for lying?’
‘Without exception.’ Meredith looked at her watch. There might be hold-ups in the rush-hour traffic, now that only the old bridge was open.
‘Who by?’ the boy asked.
‘What do you mean who by?’
‘Who should hang people who lie?’ Ewan’s eyes had a faraway look, as though he were talking to himself.
‘The honest joes of course.’
Ewan turned to his mother. ‘Then liars are stupid because there are lots more of them than there are honest joes. They could beat the joes and hang them instead.’
‘Listen!’ Emily said.
Meredith pricked up her ears. And now she could hear it too. The distant rumble of an engine getting closer.
The boy jumped down from the bench. ‘Here he comes! Emily, let’s hide and give him a fright.’
‘Yes!’
The children disappeared into the bedroom while Meredith went to the window. Tried to shade her eyes from the sun. She felt an unease she couldn’t explain. Perhaps she was afraid the Duff who came home wouldn’t be the same one who had left that morning.
Duff put his car in neutral and let it roll the last part of the gravel track to the house. The gravel murmured and fretted like subterranean trolls beneath the wheels. He had driven like a man possessed from Caithness, had broken a principle he had always adhered to, never to misuse the blue light he kept in the glove compartment. With the light on the roof he had managed to jump the queue on the road to the old bridge, but once there the carriageway was so narrow that even with the light he’d had to grit his teeth as they moved forward at a snail’s pace. He braked hard and the subterranean voices died. Switched off the engine and got out. The sun was shining on the white sheets on the veranda welcoming him home with a wave. She had done the washing. All the bedlinen so that he wouldn’t think she had only done the sheets on the marital bed. And even though he was sated with love-making, the notion warmed his heart. Because he had left Caithness. And Caithness had left him. She had stood in the door, wiping a last tear, given him a last goodbye kiss and said that now the door was closed to him. She could do this now that she had made up her mind. One day maybe someone else would come through the door he was leaving. And he replied that he hoped so, and the ‘someone else’ would be a very lucky man. On the street he had leaped in the air with relief, happiness and freedom regained. Yes, imagine that – free. To be with his wife and children! Life is strange. And wonderful.
He walked towards the veranda. ‘Ewan! Emily!’ Usually when he came home they ran out to meet him. But sometimes they also hid to launch a surprise attack on him.
He dodged between the lines of sheets.
‘Ewan! Emily!’
He stopped. He was hidden between the sheets, which cast long shadows that moved across the veranda floor. He inhaled the soap’s perfume and the freshwater in which they had been washed. There was another smell too. He smiled. Broth. His smile became even broader as he remembered the good-natured discussion they’d had when Ewan insisted on having the beard glued on before he ate his soup. It was perfectly still. The ambush could come at any second.
There were tiny dots of sunshine in the shadows the sheets cast.
He stood staring at them.
Then down at himself. At his sweater and trousers covered with tiny dots of sunshine. He felt his heart skip a beat. Ran a finger over a sheet. It found a hole at once. And another. He stopped breathing.
Pulled the sheet at the back to the side.
The kitchen window was gone. The wall was holed so badly it looked more like a hole than a wall. He looked in through where the window had been. The pot on the hotplate looked like a sieve. The stove and the floor around were covered with a steaming yellowish-green broth.
He wanted to go inside. He had to go inside. But he couldn’t; it was as if his feet were frozen to the veranda floor and his willpower was deactivated.
But there’s no one in the kitchen, he told himself. Empty. Perhaps the rest of the house was empty too. Destroyed but empty. Perhaps they had escaped to the cabin. Perhaps. Perhaps he hadn’t lost everything.
He forced himself to pass through the opening where the door had been. He went into the children’s rooms. First Emily’s, then Ewan’s. Checked the cupboards raked with machine gun fire and under the beds. No one. Nor in the guest room. He went towards the last room, his and Meredith’s bedroom, with the broad soft double bed where on Sunday mornings they made room for all four of them, lay on their sides, tickled bare toes to the children’s loud shrieks, gently scratched each other’s backs, talked about all sorts of weird and wonderful things and fought to decide who should get up first.
The bedroom door hadn’t been shot away, but the gaps between the bullet holes were the same as elsewhere in the house. Duff took a deep breath.
Perhaps not all was lost yet.
He gripped the handle. Opened the door.
Of course he knew he had been lying to himself. He had become good at it: the more he had practised self-deception the easier it had been to see what he wanted to see. But in the last few days the scales had fallen from his eyes and now he was there and couldn’t not see what lay before his eyes. The feathers from the mattress were everywhere, as though snow had been falling. Perhaps that was why everything seemed so peaceful. Meredith looked as if she had tried to keep Ewan and Emily warm as they sat on the floor in the far corner with her arms around them. Red feathers were stuck to the walls around them.
Duff’s breathing came in gasps. And then came a sob. One single, bitter, raging sob.
Everything was lost.
Absolutely everything was lost.
22
DUFF REMAINED STANDING IN THE doorway. Saw the blanket on the bed. He knew it wouldn’t help if he waded into the feathers; all he would do was contaminate the crime scene and potentially destroy th
e evidence. But he had to cover them up. Cover them up for a last time, they couldn’t stay like that. He stepped inside, then stopped.
He had heard a sound. A shout.
He backed out and strode into the sitting room, over to the smashed window facing south-east, towards the lake. There was the cry again. So far away he couldn’t see who was shouting, but sound carried well out there in the afternoon. The voice sounded angry. It had repeated the same word, but Duff couldn’t make out what it was. He pulled out the remains of a chest drawer, took out the binoculars kept there, focused on the cabin. One lens of the binoculars was pierced, but the other was good enough for him to see a fair-haired man hurrying towards the house on the narrow road. Behind him, in front of the cabin, stood a lorry, on the back of which was a man whose face he recognised. Seyton. He was standing between what looked like two enormous meat-mincers on stands. Duff remembered Macbeth’s words. Stay in bed for two days at least . . . an order. Macbeth had known. Known that Duff was about to reveal that he had killed Duncan. Lennox. Lennox, the traitor. There was no judge from Capitol coming to town tomorrow.
Duff saw Seyton’s mouth moving before the sound reached him. The same furious word: ‘Angus!’
Duff moved back from the window so that the glass in the binoculars wouldn’t reflect the sun and give him away. He had to escape.
As darkness fell over the town, news of the massacre at the Norse Riders’ club house was already spreading. And at nine o’clock most of the town’s journalists, TV and radio crews were gathered in Scone Hall. Macbeth stood in the wings listening to Lennox welcome them to the press conference.
‘We would ask you not to use flash until the chief commissioner has finished, and please ask questions by raising a hand and speaking. And now here is this proud town’s chief commissioner, Macbeth.’
This introduction – and possibly the rumours of the victory over the Norse Riders in the battle at the club house – were cause enough for a couple of the less experienced journalists to clap when Macbeth appeared on the podium, but the thin applause died under the eloquent gazes of the more seasoned members of the audience.
